


Leave No Regrets

by AceQueenKing



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous Sole Survivor, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wendigo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 18:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13129674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: Jessica returns to the mountain to say her goodbyes.





	Leave No Regrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selkit/gifts).



Her therapist said it was a bad idea to go back to the mountain. Jess, as usual, didn’t listen.

It was easy enough to disregard all of his well-meant ideas. To tell herself that it didn’t matter, the cost to her. His warnings of how it might affect her were well-meaning but, ultimately, easily disregarded. Jess had always lived by her own code. She had seen her share of horror movies and had vowed to never live like the meek victim, who died for the oh-so-high sin of _daring_ to have sex.

If she was gonna live fast and die young, she was gonna enjoy it. She wasn’t an idiot, mind - Jess never touched drugs, or skydiving, or anything like that - but she was never going to turn down a chance to do what she wanted, to speak her mind, to do what she wanted to do. No regrets, that was her credo.

And it was one she kept, even though all that happened. Ironic that it had been inspired by those old horror movies - now she had lived through one.

And, even more ironically, the girl who had dared to scream about how much she loved sex, the girl who had been reduced to crawling in the dark in blood and dirt stained panties and a bra - she was the only one who had survived.

Josh, she thought, would have loved that irony. It would have been worthy of the movies he’d never make now. He’d always loved playing with the oldest and hoariest tropes; the slut being the survivor, the capable boyfriend murdered by a cruelly unknown threat.

Her heart squeezed at the thought of Mike, and she forced herself to stop, to feel numb. _It wasn’t my fault_ , she thought and kept that as a mantra as she walked in practical hiking boots, heading up to the destroyed cabin on land that the Washingtons’ would no doubt sell as soon as they could bring themselves to do so. _It wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault._

It was calmer now than the last time she had been there; no snow, now. That was weird, too; the mountain looked different without the snow. It was green, lively, full of vines and grass; it felt wrong, to see how many flowers were alive here, drawing nutrients from the bodies of her friends. (What had been recovered, Jess wondered, though she already knew the answer. Nothing, almost; a scarf here, a boot there - most of her friend's remains had been incinerated in the final blast.) 

It was quieter on the mountain it had ever been. Without the wind and the snow and Josh, Mike (oh _Mike_ ), Emily, and the others - the mountain felt less like a vacation spot and more like a tomb. It was quiet - too quiet - and she ignored the feeling of unease that flowed through her limbs, because she knew she had to come even if no one agreed, and she knew it would be different, this time, because she was prepared and because people knew where she was. She had a cell phone that was well charged and three different charged-up power banks; she had enough food for four days at maximum gluttony; she had packed a GPS that professional hikers used on Mt. Everest. She was going to do what she had always done: _survive_.

She walked past the rusted out cars, so much less ominous than they had been last time - now she knew they were long-abandoned, rusted out hulks of a different time. So different from seeing them covered in snow, their bulky box shapes being hidden by the white void, when it felt like they could have been from just a couple days, a couple weeks prior.

She took a shortcut past one, remembering how Josh had told her that this was a way to go on a shorter trip. She’d taken the long way around last time - so enraptured with Mike, so dreading Em - but this time, she felt no need to take her time. She’d come here to make her peace. She hadn’t come here to soak in the atmosphere.

She ducked past the hulking Goliath of a seventies van; she put a hand on the door to steady herself and something shot up to the window, gleaming white; she screamed and hit the ground, covering her designer outfit in the mud.

She waited, shivering, her head in her hands. She could feel her pulse skyrocketing. She stayed there for over a minute, listening carefully for any kind of sound, and there - was - _nothing_.

Daring, she looked up. A paper-mache skull was hung by a wire in the old car; it was old, sun-bleached a sickly yellow-white after over a year of being exposed to the elements.

“Josh,” she said, softly. “You fucking idiot.” She was furious but not so much so that she didn’t open the door (and he had left it open, of course, he had, for someone with a much money as Josh, it was _never_ going to be a thought that someone might steal a seventies junker just to have a car) and removed the mask.

 _Gotcha! - Josh_ was written on the back in an uneven scrawl. She tucked the mask into her pack and kept going. The therapist would tell her she shouldn’t keep it, that it was a relic of a traumatic past, but Jess knew when everything else was gone, the only thing she would have to remember them would be these unintentional curios - a token of their past.

She tromped on-wards. Josh either hadn’t bothered to booby trap the rest of the way or the traps had been undone, either by her dead (long dead) friends or by nature. Entropy devours all, wasn’t that what Chris had said?

She had a feeling Josh would approve.

The shorter path really was shorter, and she reached the cabin’s remains in record time. There was no need to have to triangulate it with her GPS, though she’d taken the liberty of doing so; there was still wreckage strewn about the sight. She dropped her pack and walked forward, kneeled next to broken stairs.

“I’m sorry,” she said and felt a tear slip down her cheek. There was more she wanted to say - she was sorry to them all in their own ways. Sorry that Mike had died while she had lived; sorry that she’d never apologized to Em; sorry that Chris and Ashley had never quite been able to grow up, sorry that Hannah and Beth had died scared and alone in a cold, dark place and all of that was on her, for being young and dumb.

“I’m sorry,” she said, again, and felt how hollow it sounded. She choked on the words and put one hand on the wood. “I hope you’re at peace,” she whispered, again. “All of you.”

She wasn’t prone to praying, but she did, for all the good it would do. It felt like there were eyes on her but she ignored it; paranoia had become something that she was simply used to living with at this point.

After a few minutes, she dried her tears, walked down the mountain, her pack in hand. She didn’t feel lighter, or smarter, or more at peace, yet, but she hoped it would come. As her psychologist would say, things would take time. It was an uneventful walk back; no booby-traps, no noise but the crunch of her boots in the dirt. She’d over-prepared, but being a survivor had taught her it was better to be safe than sorry.

It wasn’t until she got home that she discovered that there was only one thing missing from her pack: Josh’s death-mask, the _Gotcha_! skull.

It was easier to tell herself that she had dreamed it; easier to tell herself that it was a delusion, a psychotic break that had been caused simply by too much stress. It was easier, and so she clung to it. The truth - that something was still alive out there, something was still living and breathing and still knew what she had _survived_ \- was too hard to bear. Even if it were true, what could she do? What was left there was twisted, inhuman. And Jess, unlike Em, knew that there were stories that should remain untold.

And so Jess stayed away from the mountain and buried the truth deep.

She had always been a survivor, and she left the mountain with no regrets.


End file.
